1) The Turn: Restoring Wildness in the Computational Age

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The Turn: Restoring Wildness in the Computational Age traces Stephen Hawking’s “century of complexity.”  This cultural watershed was produced by the use of the computer.  The Newtonian revolution created the industrial world.  This revolution offers a window into network behavior.  Restoration is the promise of new insights and tools.  Healthier natural and human communities are in the offing.  This frontier offers a promising future.

The Turn demonstrates the inevitability of a future that knows how to use, instead of being used by, digital technology.   Legacy science is mired in formulas. These describe a small slice of predictable reality.  The rest is left to hacking, mapping and modeling computational grads.  Reality is vastly larger than your high school science teacher knew.

The methods of lab science and network tools, like hacks, maps and models, are like oil and water.  They don’t stay mixed, but complement each other.   Science coughs up formulas where things are regular.  Network emergence is where the formulas come from.  Hacks, maps and models help get a feel for the emergent regularities that make life and the world work.  Formulas help extract work from the world.  Hacks, maps and models help work with emergent patterns in the world.  They offer a more textured understanding of the world.

Getting a more textured understanding of our uncertain, semi-orderly universe is already paying off in wellness, restored natural and human communities and careers.